Ilana Mercer, January 15, 2010

Sarah Palin is in the news for a change, not for the most significant thing she has done of late, but for the least significant. Scrap that: Joining the Fox News lineup of analysts is hardly inconsequential, although it is a bad move.

The most important of Palin’s recent maneuvers was to pooh-pooh CPAC. As Politico reported, “Palin had declined an invitation to address the Conservative Political Action Conference next month calling it a forum that will place ‘special interests over core beliefs’ and ‘pocketbook over policy.’

“Was a GOP-Palin political divorce in the offing? Is Palin preparing to part company with “politics as usual” ─ the tired slogan she and Sen. John McCain coined for their campaign? (Palin, of course, had embodied unusual politics on the local level.)

I had sincerely hoped that Sarah Palin had come to realize that reviving the rigor-riddled Republican Party would be like trying to breathe life into a corpse. Neither possible, nor desirable. The CPAC snub, coupled with Palin’s endorsement, last year, of the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman for the 23rd Congressional District of New York, made it look like she was indeed galloping away from the “GOP, RIP.”

More promising developments followed. Palin will be headlining the First National Tea Party Convention, in Nashville, TN, scheduled for February. She’ll be joined by Michele Bachmann. And, as David Shyster advertised negatively on MSNBC, by WND’s founder and CEO, Joseph Farah.

Against this bright background, Sarah Palin suddenly switched gears and joined the Fox-News pack as one of its jack-of-all-trades experts.

Unfortunately, the governor has a propensity for rambling, run-off sentences, peppered with grating gerunds. Pearls of wisdom are often lost in the prolix answers she gives. Then there is Mrs. Palin’s mindless militarism. You can’t make this up, but on leaving the gubernatorial office, for instance, Palin scolded the media thus: “In honor of the American solder, quit making things up.”

Someone ought to tell Mrs. Palin that idolizing the military ─ and the missions it executes on behalf of its political masters ─ amounts to the worship of Moloch, not the Almighty.

Paramount for Palin, then ─ at least if she wants to survive the ravages of future Fey (Tina) satirization ─ is to fashion herself as an expert, not as a generalist. On energy and environmental issues Palin is indeed an ace. When it comes to the ins-and-outs of the oil and gas industry ─ ownership, extraction, contracts and leases ─ Sarah Palin is as sharp as a tack. On both the philosophical and pragmatic levels, she grasps the urgent need to commercialize America’s abundant resources.

As regards the personal: Because Palin comes from a clan that has lived-off the land by necessity, Mother Palin cherishes “Mother Earth.” (Once a fisherwoman, Sarah lived through an oil spill that decimated her family’s food-supply and living.) Alaska runs in Sarah’s blood stream; its wild life, its seascape and landscapes, as well as man’s reliance on both for muse and … meat.

Money Quote: “Hollywood needs to know: We eat therefore we hunt.”

This Alaskan Diana, goddess of the hunt, is carnivore and conservationist.

From Alaska, lushly described on every page of Going Rogue, cut to the Palin parade on Fox News. In no time at all, Palin was clucking over the merits of the two-party cartel. We are a two-party system, she told Glenn Beck. “The Republican Party, the planks in our platform are, are the best, strongest planks upon which to build a great state, Alaska, a great country.” And while Palin confessed to being tempted to flee the duopoly, she vowed to remain a Republican.

BECK: Does that rule out third party for you — not saying a run — would you support a third party?PALIN: I don’t think that there is that need for a third party if Republicans get back to what the planks say

Palin’s assertion is pie-in-the-sky; not pragmatism but falsehood. The Democratic and Republican parties ─ each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one entity to the other.

The standstill state-of-affairs hinges on bamboozling party supporters. As my WND colleague Vox Day has observed, no sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right. At some point, McCain reaches across the aisle and the creeps converge.

The Constitution the colluding quislings only ever conjure as a weapon against the opposing, fleetingly dethroned faction. If only Sarah Palin recognized and acted on this intractable reality.